Saying they are no more complex and adapted than any other organism sells them far short. Yet they're more stubborn than a mule, somewhat slower than a horse, they smell worse than either, and they'll spit on a person like a llama. They've been known to bite. Their shape is not is amenable to riding although they are used as mounts. So there are things one might really want to change before spending a lot of time with one.
So those feet that are great on sand were made for walking on snow covered ground.
Likewise food is scarce in both the arctic during the winter and in the desert.
But if we focus on vertebrates, they are all so very very complex and adapted. Everything you've listed for a camel is at best a cherry on top. All other vertebrates are within a couple percent, and many of them have feature lists just as long.
Also, while 'raku' is the reading for 楽, which connotes easy, simple and other good things, it is also the reading for a bunch of other characters--namely, 落, which means or carries the connotation of falling, declining or otherwise missing the mark.
When I see the 'raku' transliteration in the context of Perl, I think of 落. Not sure if that says something about my subconscious perception of Perl or not, but I can't help but think 'Raku' is a bad choice for the name of a language mired in indecision and falling from public favor.
On another note, I find the inclination of tech projects towards poorly translated Japanese words amusing. It nicely compliments the phenomena you see in the use of random English words for the naming of Japanese cars, condo buildings, and other 'prestigious' products. So if you find that ridiculous, you should find these 'Japanese' technology names ridiculous as well.
Interestingly enough 落(raku) also has the connotation of failure or missing the target, so not very auspicious in the context of a new language either!
Perl <=5 did make it, it was quite big in the 90s and early 2000s.
Rakudo means paradise: https://jisho.org/word/楽土
Rakuda is a camel: https://jisho.org/word/駱駝
I don't Perl much, but aren't those both scalars and @foo is an array variable. $foo[0] would be a scalar that is the first element of @foo, right?
The main questions I have when doing something in an unfamiliar language are now:
1. What is the syntax for X
2. Can it do Y
3. Is there a library/builtin for Z
For anything else, I've probably been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
I remember using some books to get a structured introduction when I started out many years ago though.
Nowadays I'll probably just open whatever existing code there is, go "ah, so it's like that", and hack away with the help of Google.
The stuff that takes actual learning tend to be major frameworks for me, not so much whatever programming language is used.
for @a { .say }
my $lambda = { .say }
@a.map( $lambda );
for @a -> $item { say $item }
if $a.method() -> $result { say $result }
my $lambda = -> $result { say $result }
Raku is a much more consistent language than beginners expect. The above is just one example of this.
Because it is so consistent; once you learn something in one place, you can use that knowledge everywhere in the language.
But first you have to realize that is even a possibility.
It would take a long time to come to that conclusion if you write Raku by copy-pasting code.
That is because very few languages are as strangely consistent as Raku.
One of the worst problems for adoption of perl6 has been always overthinking. "Hey, look at my cool name" has never convinced anybody to use a computer language. Too many names.
Raku is a good name indeed. Like a promise of prune and simplify all the former zoo of names that could finally allow the people to focuse in the program
You're overthinking it. I don't think those who came up with the names did so to, or cared to, convince people to use the language with them...
Mission acomplished then, if we take a look to the low interest in people to massively adopt the language since it was released in 2015
Yeah, as if the name is what caused the non-adoption of a 20 years late replacement for a language that had already fallen out of fashion with developers (and with many growing pains in the compiler and tooling to boot).
If anything, they used the "Perl 6" for most of the time, which renders the argument even more moot...
Because 2015 - 2000 does not equal 20.
The project started in 2000.
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It would have been a much worse language if it had been released even a few months earlier. (That was before the GLR landed.)
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Also just about every time a new feature was added in the first few years the existing features were redesigned so that everything was consistent.
So despite having many features from many languages, it feels like all of those features belonged together.
Because of the time taken back then, it is actually really easy to add new features to the language now. (Try adding first-class regexes to any other existing language.)
For example, all of the normal operators are just subroutines with a special name. Which means you can create a new operator that works exactly like a built-in operator by giving it a similar special name. (From a certain viewpoint, Raku doesn't have built-in operators.)
Also regexes (which have been redesigned to be easier to read) and string literals are actually Domain Specific Languages in Raku. Which means you can also add your own similar feature if you felt so inclined.
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I like to think of it this way:
A language like Python is a good toolbox.
Raku is also like a good toolbox, except it is also a fully decked out machine shop for creating new tools that no one has thought of yet.
Everyone who has worked in a machine shop knows it takes a few years to get one setup just-right.
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Also there is a saying:
It can be good, fast, or cheap. Pick at most two.
Raku was created entirely by volunteers, so by definition it has to be cheap.
Which means there was only ever a choice between fast or good.
I'm glad the choice was to make it good rather than fast.
(Especially since the whole reason to create it was to make something that was more good than Perl was at the time.)
Not everything counts equally. If something affects the adoption by 1M users, and another is only a concern for 100 weirdos, the second is not exactly a major issue to focus on...
noun: weirdo;
1) a person whose dress or behaviour seems strange or eccentric.
Yep, weirdos will never ever have any influence on Perl development or Perl community.
https://www.ecured.cu/Larry_Wall#/media/File:Imagen_Larry_Wa...
(Hebrew word formation is from 3-consonant roots, not concatenation, so removing a letter doesn't give a related word. It's either an invalid word or a different root with 3rd voiceless consonant רקוא which is a not a root / רקוע Raku'a "flattened" but that doesn't sounds quite differently.)
Incidentally, it also happens to sound similar to "roku" (="six").